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Don’t make the mistake I did with Team Foundation Server 2008 media on MSDN downloads. The MSDN file en_visual_studio_team_system_2008_team_foundation_server_workgroup_x86_x64wow_dvd_X14-29253.iso is the workgroup edition, as the file name suggests. The problem is that you cannot upgraded it to a full edition. TFS documentation says that a trial or workgroup edition can be upgraded by entering a valid CD-key when in Add remove programs, maintenance mode; however this option is greyed out if you install from this media. I checked with Microsoft and there is no way round this for this ISO image. ...

I have been trying to get a simple means for our clients to log faults into our TFS system whilst inside our MOSS2007 based customer portal. I had been suffering from two major problems as my previous posts mentioned. However, I now have some solutions or at least workarounds: Historically all users who connected to the TFS server needed a Team Foundation Client CAL - this issue has been addressed by changes in licensing for TFS by Microsoft; basically it is now free to look at work items and add bugs The way the SharePoint and TFS APIs handle user identity (SPUser & ICreditial) do not match, and are not improbable. There is no way round the user having to reenter their user credentials for each system - so my web part logs into TFS as a user set via it’s parameters, this is not the same user as the credentials used to authenticate into SharePoint, it is in effect a proxy user for accessing TFS So where does this leave us? ...

I also submitted a session for SQLBits II in Birmingham on using Visual Studio to manage the life cycle of DB projects. The voting for this community conference I assume opens in the new year as submissions close this weekend. It will be interesting to see if this more central location (well central to England not the UK) attracts more attendees than Reading. Again vote early and often.

And I may be speaking at Developer Day Scotland - it is all down to you; like other DDD style events the attendees get a chance to select what they would like to see. So keep an eye on the possible agenda and please vote as soon at submission close.

I will be speaking at what I think is the inaugural meeting of the Peterborough VBUG User group in Team Foundation Servers. For more details see http://www.vbug.co.uk/Events/January-2008/VBUG-Team-Foundation-Server-with-Richard-Fennell.aspx Hope to see you there.

I posted yesterday on using Powershell to email a TFS user if they had files checked out. Well, we still run a legacy set of SourceSafe databases for old projects that are under maintenance, but not major redevelopment. (Our usual practice is to migrate projects to TFS at major release points). Anyway, these SourceSafe repositories are just as likely, if not more so, to have files left checked out as TFS. The following script email a list of all checked out files in a SourceSafe DB ...

I am far from the first to post about the Alt.Net.UK conference next year. I think this is a great idea, I have posted a few times on how I am finding the most useful conferences being the ones about best practice. New technology is great, we all like new toys, but it is the engineering practices we do day to day that have the most effect in the quality of your work, not the IDE we use. ...

With any source control system it is possible to leave files checked out. This is especially true if your IDE does the checking out behind the scenes. This is made worse still by the fact you can have a number of workspaces on the same PC in TFS. It is too easy to forget. It is therefore a good idea to check from time to time that the files you have checked out are the ones you think you have. There is nothing worse than trying to work on a project to find a key file is checked out or locked to another user or PC. ...

Last night I went to a lecture by Dr Alexander Martynov and Colonel Alexander Volkov organised by [Space Connections](http://pace Connections “http://www.spaceconnections.net/") on the Russian space efforts in both the Soviet and current era. The thing that struck me was the often spoken of different between the US/NASA technology based solution and the the Russian ‘simple first’ philosophy e.g. the cosmonaut should be able to fix it themselves with the tools to hand, a philosophy the Mir space station repeatedly showed ...

Since I upgraded my VS2008 Beta2 to the RTM, the intellisense has not been working. I have seen a few posts about this, some suggesting you need to reset the configuration by running devenv.exe /safemode (see http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms241278(VS.80).aspx) but this did not work for me. So I had a poke about in Tools|Option and found that on the Text Editor|All Languages that the three checkboxes for Statement Completion where showing neither empty or checked but a fully coloured box - which usually means an unknown settings. So a set these all to checked (a tick) and my Intellisense started working. ...